


as the hours draw down

by noiselesspatientspider



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Bondage, Canonical Character Death, Dom/sub, Dreams, F/F, Fisting, Unhealthy Relationships, i mean it's hella so, these poor tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-11
Updated: 2017-07-11
Packaged: 2018-11-30 18:04:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11468811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noiselesspatientspider/pseuds/noiselesspatientspider
Summary: Adaire draws extravagance out of her in a way that Adelaide, who is as extravagant in death as in life, never could.





	as the hours draw down

Hella knows her body. She knows what it can do, how long her arms will hold her before she has to let go. The strength of her thighs, the burn in her back. Nothing is unfamiliar here, nothing out of place. 

She can feel the sweat at the small of her back, the backs of her knees. If she weren’t wearing gloves, her sword hilt would slip in her grasp. It doesn’t.

She falls back. Another figure eight, another rush forward. Strike, strike, parry. Calhoun’s throat in her hands. Adelaide falls forward on her sword. She blinks, and it’s just the pile of branches she’d lashed together crumpling to the forest floor. 

She swallows. She centers herself the way she’d learned years ago, back when she first learned to fight. Back when she first learned what her sword could do. What she could do, given the opportunity. She swings again. 

When she returns from the forest, hours later, her muscles burning in a way she knows will settle into an ache in two days, Adaire offers her tea from her own kettle. She takes a cup, feeling the warmth seep into her belly. And later, when Adaire offers her three fingers and a willing mouth, she takes that too. Hella knows better than to reject comfort when it’s offered to her. 

It’s almost enough to keep the dreams away. 

Adelaide is seated on a throne. Adelaide is gurgling on a sword in the top floor of Samot’s tower. Her face shifts, and she’s a lighter-skinned man with dark eyes and broad shoulders who smiles gently at her as he dies. She’s a shrieking chorus of robed figures. 

She’s Adelaide again, her smile plush and imperious, a hand on Hella’s shoulder. Beaded necklaces clink gently against Hella’s bare back, pearls like hundreds of tiny cold drops of sweat. She’s pulling Hella close to her, one finger on her jaw, pearlescent curiosity shining in her eyes. 

“Hella,” she says, and Hella wakes with a start, cunt aching, Adaire’s hand on her shoulder.

Adaire leaves her many questions at the door of her tent. It’s one of the many things Hella loves about her. She doesn’t ask if Hella is all right. She draws Hella in, tangles her clever hands in Hella’s hair, leaves sweet kisses at the corner of her eyes where the tears have leaked out. She lets Hella pull away when it’s too much. She lets Hella kiss wetly, broadly, at her throat, her breasts, her belly. She lets Hella get her messy, leaking, aching, open. She lets Hella make her human, and Hella loves her for it.

Hella knows her body. She knows what it can do, how long her arms will hold her before she has to let go. The roll of her hips, the strength of her thighs. She knows how to move the broad pads of her fingers so that Adaire will clench around her, will sigh softly above her. She knows how to coax the bright blush Adaire keeps in the apples of her cheeks down towards the swell of her breasts. 

She knows these things because Adaire has taught her. They have learned together, Adaire mapping out the things Hella likes. How to yank Hella’s head back by a fistful of her hair and bite at the crux of her jaw, how to rest a hand just so on the back of Hella’s neck. How to fill Hella up, one thumb slipping into the corner of her mouth and four fingers stretching her cunt wide. 

Adaire has many plans, and most of them are good. 

Hella only has one. Hadrian might say it was evil. It’s very simple: stay alive.

\--

One night Adaire brings back a length of soft rope from Rosemerrow and uses the knots Hella taught her to tie her to the tent stakes. “You have to do two things for me, all right?” she says, eyes dancing as Hella flexes. “Hold still, and tell me how much you want this.” And Hella moans for her.

Adaire draws extravagance out of her in a way that Adelaide, who is as extravagant in death as in life, never could. Hella bites back a laugh at the thought that this woman with the gold rubbing off her embroidery can command something the Empress of Pearls cannot. And then Adaire nips at her thigh, and she stops biting back a laugh to bite back a moan.

“Tell me,” Adaire says. “Tell me how good my fingers feel inside you. Tell me how badly you want me to fuck you.” She’s moving almost her entire hand in Hella now, thumbing at her clit on the outward stroke. 

“I want-- please, Adaire. Please.”

“What do you want? I need you to tell me.”

“I want you to fuck me with your hand, please, your whole hand, I need it.”

Adaire grins at her. Wisps of hair escape her braids. The whole tent reeks of sex. “Do you think you can take it?”

Three nights ago, Adelaide laid Hella out on the marble floor of the throne room and slowly, inexorably, put her entire fist into Hella’s cunt. Hella had come three times before she’d managed to fit her thumb in. She’d thought she would shatter.

Adelaide had been holding a single massive pearl when her hand had gone in. Hella thinks it might be still inside her. 

“Yes,” Hella sobs. “Please, Adaire.”

“All right,” Adaire says, and she kisses Hella so sweetly Hella thinks she might choke on it. She can taste tea and herself on Adaire’s tongue, tangy, bitter. 

Adaire is careful, methodical. She takes her time coaxing Hella further open before tucking her thumb and slipping her hand inside. Her hands are small and they’ve pinned Hella in place completely. Hella can feel her knuckles rub against the inner walls of her. She’s the most alive she’s ever been.

“Look at you,” Adaire says. “Look at how strong you are, how ready to open up for me.” She runs her other hand over Hella’s breasts, down across her scarred stomach. Hella whines. 

“Do you want to come?” 

Hella can’t speak.

“Just nod,” Adaire says, leaning down to press a kiss at the corner of Hella’s mouth. She leans back, gazing down at Hella. 

Hella has never done anything in her life to deserve this inscrutable and open woman. She nods.

Adaire uses her other hand to rub Hella’s clit where it’s swollen and aching. “Go ahead then,” she says, and Hella shudders and shudders and shudders until she can’t shudder anymore, until she’s pushing Adaire away.

Adaire pulls gently out of her with an obscene squelch. Her whole forearm is drenched. “Do you want to feel what you did to me?” she asks.

“Yes, but I don’t think I can move,” Hella says, fisting her hands against the ropes. 

Adaire lets out a peal of laughter. “That’s not what I asked,” she says, crawling up Hella’s body. She crouches over Hella’s face and grinds her cunt against her mouth so that Hella can taste how dripping wet she is, how proud. Hella laps at her until Adaire comes with a rush against her, thighs rippling, head thrown back. 

She unties Hella, strokes her hair, wraps them both in a soft blanket. She curls around her, all soft arms and soft, sweet-smelling hair. 

“Who’s Adelaide?” she asks.

There are a lot of answers to that question. ‘The Queen of Death,’ for one. ‘I loved her and I killed her,’ for another. ‘Every night in my dreams she fucks me comprehensively while I’m lying here next to you, and then I wake up and ask you to fuck me the same way.’

“No one in particular,” Hella says, instead. 

Adaire hums softly, noncommittally. She doesn’t pull away, but Hella can tell when Adaire is thinking too hard about something.

‘I trust you,’ she wants to say. ‘I trust you completely. I might trust her, even. I don’t trust you with her, or her with you.’ But Hella doesn’t say anything, and eventually Adaire falls asleep, snuffling slightly behind her, and Hella lies awake in her arms until Hadrian comes to trade watch.

The moons are bright tonight. They shimmer through the trees and onto the snow like giant luminescent pearls, the way light glints off an ocean, or a blade. Hella sits by the fire and looks into the darkness. She rests one hand on her sword. She has been a soldier for too long not to know when the bad things are coming. She waits.

**Author's Note:**

> "how many fisting fics can one fandom have"
> 
> more, i guess
> 
> title is from the mountain goats' hebrews 11:40 because i have one (1) titling method
> 
> i'm @shipyrds on twitter


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